Yana Experiences is closing down

[Guest guest]

When I was initially diagnosed in 1996 I was told

that I could expect to live 3 – 5 years if I did not have immediate

invasive therapy. I did not accept that advice. Once I had learned a little, I

challenged this prediction but was told that since I was a ‘young

man’ of 54 with a life expectancy in excess of ten years, I should have

the therapy soon or I would surely die before I was 70 – in a little over

fifteen years from the date of my diagnosis. Again I was not convinced by

these statements since there was no solid evidence to back up the predictions.

Since I am somewhat contrarian I made it my aim to live for at least twenty

years, if only to demonstrate that I was not wrong.

The fifteen year mark which I was told was my

predicted maximum life expectation is coming up on August 12 followed within a

few months by my Biblical ‘use by’ date of three score years and

ten. This has caused me to pause and re-examine my life; to consider what I

have achieved and what I want to do IF

I do have only the five years of my original target left. I realise that I have

been spending more time than I had originally intended on prostate cancer

related work. So that has to be cut back. As an initial step, I am sorry to

have to tell you that I will shortly be closing the Experiences section of YANA.

Fortunately a similar, but much improved version of

the YANA Experiences site has been developed in Switzerland

and I would urge everyone who has contributed their experiences to the YANA site to move their story there. It has become very

clear to me over the last fifteen years that personal accounts of our journeys

are very important indeed to those who follow behind us. My

story is there already.

The Swiss site is called myProstate and is at http://www.myprostate.eu/

All information on the site is available in four languages at present and there

are many excellent features such as summaries of side effects of various

therapies and drugs, graphs that plot PSA (and other) results, and many others.

Updating your story will be much more simple in the future than it is now because

contributors can enter data and details of their journey directly.

All that is needed initially is to use a valid

e-mail address to set up a password, fill in the chosen name, country, date of

birth (to calculate present age and age at diagnosis) and language choice. This

will establish a blog and details of individual stories can then be entered.

The simplest way to do that, for anyone who has contributed to Yana is to copy the

current Yana entry into a word processing

document such as Word.doc, edit it if necessary and then copy and paste onto

the myProstate site. Perhaps ten minutes work but invaluable to others.

Good luck to each of you on your journey and my thanks

to those of you who participated on Yana.

All the best

Prostate men need enlightening, not frightening

Terry Herbert - diagnosed in 1996 and still going

strong

Read A Strange Place for unbiased information at http://www.yananow.org/StrangePlace/index.html